It’s hard to believe that near- ly a year has gone by as your president. It’s been a very good year — thanks to many of you. The hard work and problem-solving
skills that WSBA volunteers and staff
bring to the Bar’s activities is pretty awe-inspiring. I can’t think of another profession in which practitioners devote so
much time to improving the profession
and protecting the public.

I’m going to miss having so many
opportunities to move around the state
and meet attorneys and judges. In particular, I’d like to thank the attorneys in
colville, okanogan, Wenatchee, ellensburg, Bellingham, and Mt. Vernon who
were so welcoming to WSBA executive
Director Paula Littlewood and me on our
Listening Tour, and the local bar leadership in Snohomish, king, Pierce, Thurston, Benton-Franklin, Spokane, and
clark counties for making time to meet
with the WSBA leadership. I learned
something from each of these meetings
and I had a great time while doing it.

As I leave office, I’d like to
highlight an issue that I heard
often from attorneys in many
parts of the state. For many of
us, the business of practicing
law is getting harder. clients
are less loyal than they used
to be, and many of them are
doing more of their own work
and/or sharply bargaining
over rates. We have to turn
away individuals and businesses, without regard to
their ability to pay, because
we would have to charge
them more than whatever
amount is at issue. And when
we take into account ability
to pay, it’s pretty obvious that
a majority of our state’s citizens can’t afford us.

This phenomenon is notconfined to young lawyerswho can’t serve middle in-come clients and still servicelaw school loans. The largestcorporations in America arealso the most effective at negotiating“alternative” billing arrangements thatamount to steep discounts. These largecompanies also find it relatively easy toenlarge their in-house law staff at theexpense of outside firms.

So we have a larger and larger number of attorneys chasing a smaller and
smaller amount of work. An obvious
response is to decrease supply, and
Washington’s three law schools get
plenty of suggestions in that regard.

But we attorneys don’t make enrollment decisions, and the schools must
take a lot of factors
into account as they
decide on class size.

That leaves us with
the second option: increasing the amount
of work. There are a
number of ways to go about this.

The first is to give a price break toindividuals who otherwise would notbe in the market. WSBA’s ModerateMeans Program is designed to turnmiddle-income citizensinto paying clients. Theprogram does not divertwork from attorneyswith higher hourly ratesbecause the clients couldnever have affordedthem. We need to thinkhard about other ways todo this.

Another is to reducethe transactional costs associated withlitigation so that we can litigate smallercases. Yes, this means reducing theamount of discovery. While it is conve-nient to be able to pose as many discov-ery requests as you want, it is certainlynot efficient. The Federal Rules appear toallow both sides to learn what they needfor trial, and perhaps we cantake some cues from theserules. The WSBA has formeda task force on the escalat-ing costs of civil Litigationand it will be issuing a reportin the next few months, butmore needs to be done.

We need to take a fresh lookat the court system, and howwe decide various kinds ofcases. For example, I’ve heardmany suggestions regardingthe huge number of family lawcases in our courts. Maybethe courts should employ me-diators who helped the partiessettle, so that only the mostdifficult cases would actuallygo to trial. While “thinkingoutside the box” has become atrite phrase, it is clear that weneed to do more than tinker atthe edges of a system that hasbecome unwieldy, at least forsome categories of cases.Alternative billing arrange-So we have a larger and largernumber of attorneys chasing asmaller and smaller amount of work.